


A Fair Exchange

by musicaldork



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (Movies)
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Falling In Love, Feelings, Fluff, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Gentleness, M/M, Medical Examination, Reader-Insert, Science, Science Experiments, Temporary Character Death, Tenderness, falling in love with ur own science experiment?, more likely than u think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:00:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24686512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicaldork/pseuds/musicaldork
Summary: Reviving you into genuine humanity is is the start of something far more than simply the success of his tireless work.Request: Something involving Herbert being totally transfixed (and a little bit in love) with his first truly successful experiment!
Relationships: Herbert West/Reader
Kudos: 21





	A Fair Exchange

The first thing he notices is the steady throb of your pulse under his thumb, his hand on your wrist.

He runs his hands over yours, turning them over in his own with an odd sort of detached interest, watching the rise and fall of your chest as you suddenly take in a rattling gasp.  
Your eyes begin to flutter open, and he pulls away in a move of sudden, practised caution. 

The dying of brain cells in death can often lead to… unpredictable and erratic results in life, to say the least.  
He wasn’t about to put himself into the immediate cross-hairs of any possible eruption, as much as he would’ve liked to - in order to examine the changes up close. But he wasn’t foolhardy enough to try.

Slowly, you began to twitch yourself awake, but for once he isn’t hounded by the sound of hellish howling in its stead.

The only sounds in the basement are merely the laboured gasps of your lungs, trying to draw breath back in after having stopped. Trying to come to grips with something the living body isn’t equipped to handle.

Another truly living creature, borne of a reagent of his own design. But for once the fruits of his research now bear someone as human as any other.   
  
If he isn’t mistaken, you just might be his first true success.

Bowled over by the magnitude of what this means, he stumbles back to his desk to jot down the exact variables of this run-through, though he keeps a wary eye on you. If this is what he thinks it is, then by god, he’s done it!

Fear and awe thrums through his veins, sending his already-frazzled nerves haywire. This could be it. This could be it!

But he can’t be too hasty.  
Are you going to turn on him? Attack him? Is the violent fury somehow late-onset, or has he well and truly brought back a person, as they were in life?

You push yourself up into a sitting position, on shaky, stiff arms - looking dazed and nauseous, but none the worse for wear. Voice hoarse with disuse, you push yourself to speak, staring at the strange, bespectacled man standing at a desk. 

“Where am I? What… happened?”

You sound understandably exhausted, but there is no mistaking it. You house the humanity of an average person, making you the absolute pinnacle of his life’s work. 

You are _alive_ and _nonviolent_ \- and he couldn’t have asked for anything more.

\---

Dan had to be the one to handle the social delicacies of explaining to a shell-shocked ex-corpse exactly what had happened. 

You handled the information as best as you could - as best as any regular person could. 

Which is to say: not very well at all.

To put a name on it, the two of them were met with your disbelief, your screaming and then you crumpling, light-headed, to the ground. The latter of which sent Herbert scrambling to your side, in the desperation to preserve his work in any way he could.

Once the shock had worn off, you had reluctantly accepted their extended olive branches - providing you food, water and shelter. Did you thank them for bringing you back to life? Yell at them for stealing your body?

Too tired to think too hard, you simply took another swig from the bottle of water you were given and sat beside them in difficult silence.

\---

It definitely took some time for you to warm up to them proper, but eventually you settled into an odd sort of routine with them.

You were an impromptu housemate in the most unusual of circumstances, but you made do, eventually getting back into regular life as best as you could.

And you only flinched a little when people called you a ‘miracle case’ - though the specifics of your revival were kept obviously hush.

Another shot at life. Fancy that.

\---

Herbert spent a lot of time with you, for purposes he decreed ‘medicinally necessary.’

And yes, he did do frequent checkups on you indeed.

Sometimes you thought there was more to it, but you never pried.  
And even if you did, he’d never breathe a word about it.

Whenever his inspection of your status was done, he allowed you to stay in his lab next to him, which was as warm an offer as you could get from a man so used to being dreadfully alone.

And in that time, you had grown fond of him. And you weren’t too scared to admit it.

World’s away from his abrasive nature, his inspections of you (all blood, heart and living tissue) were always soft in a way his words were not.  
Surprising, but not incredibly so. Even when dabbling with death, you knew that he was still a doctor in practice.

And though he was always careful in his examinations, recently you had noticed an extra tenderness in the way he beheld you.

His hands - and the intensity of his gaze - were always softened when they were on you.  
Truly reverent, in a way; he held you like you were some magnificent thing. 

The grazing of his knuckles against your cheek to inspect the dilation of your eyes didn’t seem necessary, but you leaned into the touch - not breaking your gaze.

It was different from the way he touched you at first, when you had just been re-animated.  
It was different now that he knew who you were.

And sure, he may have brought you back to life, but somehow, he found that it was you who had breathed life back into him.

A fair exchange, indeed.

**Author's Note:**

> requests are open, hmu at my tumblr, dorkfanfic! :)


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